Frida Kahlo: Her Universe

Frida Kahlo: Her Universe moves beyond Kahlo’s paintings to explore the richly constructed world in which she lived and worked. Published in collaboration with the Museo Frida Kahlo, the volume brings together specialist essays and nearly 300 archival images, including photographs, clothing, personal possessions, works of popular and pre-Hispanic art collected with Diego Rivera, and views of her beloved Casa Azul. Together, these materials reveal how Kahlo’s home, dress, politics, relationships, Mexican heritage, and fascination with photography became inseparable from her artistic identity. It includes previously unseen material that had remained sealed away for roughly fifty years before becoming accessible in 2007.

Rather than treating Kahlo simply as the maker of a famous group of self-portraits, Her Universe places her art inside the material culture she deliberately surrounded herself with. It shows how Kahlo fashioned not only paintings but an entire visual identity through clothing, collecting, photography, domestic space, politics, and Mexican cultural traditions. The result is an unusually intimate portrait of how the life, the objects and the art continually informed one another. 

(Hardcover, new)